50 workers are all that stand between the world and nuclear catastrophe

By Chris Noble

The New York Times has an amazing piece looking at how the 50 workers still trying to contain the situation at Fukushima are pretty much all that stand between the world and a nuclear disaster of Chernobyl proportions.

These graphs really make you pause, and perhaps, put new value on the overused word “hero.”

“They breathe through uncomfortable respirators or carry heavy oxygen tanks on their backs. They wear white, full-body jumpsuits with snug-fitting hoods that provide scant protection from the invisible radiation sleeting through their bodies.

They are the faceless 50, the unnamed operators who stayed behind. They have volunteered, or been assigned, to pump seawater on dangerously exposed nuclear fuel, already thought to be partly melting and spewing radioactive material, to prevent full meltdowns that could throw thousands of tons of radioactive dust high into the air and imperil millions of their compatriots.

They struggled on Tuesday and Wednesday to keep hundreds of gallons of seawater a minute flowing through temporary fire pumps into the three stricken reactors, Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Among the many problems they faced was what appeared to be yet another fire at the plant.

The workers are being asked to make escalating — and perhaps existential — sacrifices that so far are being only implicitly acknowledged: Japan’s Health Ministry said Tuesday it was raising the legal limit on the amount of radiation to which each worker could be exposed, to 250 millisieverts from 100 millisieverts, five times the maximum exposure permitted for American nuclear plant workers.”

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About Disaster in Japan

MarketWatch is providing continuous coverage of the catastrophe in Japan, focusing on the global investing, business and human dimensions of the crisis. The editors are Christopher Noble and Alexander Davis.